Ruth Bader Ginsburg
A Milestone Documents Collection
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Abstract

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an associate justice on the Supreme Court from 1993 to her death in 2020, arrived at the Harvard Law School in 1956 as a student without any sort of agenda. But her early commitment to women’s rights and equality was perhaps forged when the dean of the law school asked her and her eight female classmates why they were taking up seats at the school that rightly should be occupied by men. If that were not enough, she was unable to win a clerkship for a U.S. Supreme Court justice because of her gender, and she did not receive a job offer from the New York City firm where she clerked during the summer before her final year in law school. Then, after she took a teaching position at the Rutgers University Law School, she discovered that she was being paid less than male colleagues with the same rank.